Friday, September 8, 2017

Orbiter

I
dip my pen in the ink of sleep and write my name in water. I have the etiquette
of a carnival. I walk through Thursday, a nebula of stars and hammers soaked
with yo-yos, and I clank. The abyss caresses a road. There is honey in the wind.
A mollusk has a round purpose and a nacreous soul. It all makes sense as a
Ferris wheel, a large sparkly rash oozing amusement and juice.

Bump
the shovel to open the body. The elves stagger through a forest. These are my
narratives shivering radar out of heaven. Need is an angel wilted in salt. The
loud chaos of foam serves the mind seventy turnstiles and a hungry seagull. The
mystery of a chandelier in the roar of the foundry causes a vibration to pass
from ion to ion until it reaches a fortissimo in G major. The journey assumes a
grease and flirts with shoes.

The
seagull catches a fry in mid-air. I have been around the sun seventy times.
This means that I am entitled to the use of the showers and special events that
help me stay motivated.

My
weight sparkles. I tremble with stars. The ink in my pen is sewing a soap dish.
I dream of soap. I write down the word ‘soap.’ The soap becomes an image. The
soap becomes a geometry of unseen capacity.

The sun caresses my skin, the night gives
me sticks, solitude, a hive in which I make honey, develop thoughts, drool on
my pillow. We squabble sometimes, dress for the beginning of time, knit
something, a conflagration, a shipwreck.

I mean, you know, words. It’s what we do.
We make them do things. Perform.

To fly, to be, to butcher a cloud. Rub the
frozen unbalance. Stool for eating sensual percussion. My fingers are rugged, but
hectic. Everything drips with reverie. The cricket breath creates a world. Lift
the nose device to feel the lavender.

Butter the head pillow. I pledge to
manufacture the door to weigh each outcry. Hip scientists buy me up.
Correspondence ripples through a mallet. Slide the soap away from my color, it
is not the plaything of scarabs.

What is it, this expression, is it
expression, or is it expressiveness, a kind of twitch or public greeting, what
is it, what is it to make expressions, to put them on your face, to dampen them
with a rag and dangle them over a bingo game, or toss them into the air and
juggle them? It's the debris of a big encounter with something I don’t know how
to echo.

A dragon howls. A ransom queen comes to her
body and sparkles with sadness.

Tincture of oozing silhouettes I heal in
airs the hornet awakens my leg. Coffee of congratulating wheels. Silver coast
of benevolent tea. Sheaf of words frosting in weariness the darkness to drink
by mouth and root.

I grow to enjoy Nine Inch Nails. I didn’t
at first. At first it was noise, a man’s voice grinding out words like a logging
truck. When that happens the observable universe, taken as a whole, is
remarkably tweed. I live in a shabby hotel. The sum of my achievements is a
ghost orchid potted in sphagnum moss. The springs in my bed squeak. The abyss
is my neighbor. Go to the edge where my raw bones shake. Cry for a torch. Steep
it in pitch. Light it with your mind.

Tell me, what is it that brings you to a
boil? Is it politics? Is it urban planning? How do you resolve an inner
turmoil? Do you find refuge in Proust or do you sew the light with your breath
and paint mosquitos with your feet? Me, I collect pillows. We are the firmament
we wish for. Fingers can think a fork is a spoon but if it’s a knife or a
napkin one will have to eventually admit that perceptions are delicate flowers to
be phrased in wire like a road flare, that evolution is a creative process and
that there are tigers treading softly through the forest of our unconscious
even when we sleep.

The time for revolt is upon us. I’m going
to squeeze this planet until I dissolve into rain. The awning is clean, but it
can always get cleaner.

Time creates as much as it destroys. And so
I made an airplane made of snow and hurled it at the crowd. I hear a rumble in
the color red that is enhanced by moss. I hear the cry of a mynah and the roar
of an intestine. There is value in art that forces you to be present to
yourself. It’s your wallet after all, not mine. I don’t hate money, but I’m not
in love with it, either. Sweating and swimming are not the same thing.

Proximity is a tray upon which time tastes
like salmon. Nobody plays the concertina at Costco. The antlers are immaterial.
I don’t like getting old. Keep it simple, I say. Nipples are the mushrooms of
the human chest. I no longer have ambitions. I have buffalo. These are my
feathers. And these are my dreams. Janis Joplin’s voice splashes around in my
head like a swig of Southern Comfort. I throw rocks at the dawn. My thoughts
are heavy. They form doors and windows or break out on the skin as ventilators.
Sadness overflows my chest. I turn infrared and cry. I’m signally you from a
distance. Can you hear me? Can you see me? I haven’t thrown a baseball in
years. I feel that I’m become a little too congenial at this moment. I worry
about everything. How do you stop that? The rain falls long and easy. Let’s
just say that the plays are performed in a cloud of steam and leave it at that.

Reality is a rattle in the elbow of
electricity. This beard is my grandfather. Even now, there are winds shaping
and moving the dunes of the Sahara. These very words are teeming with socks.
I’m going to walk through a tunnel now, and when I come out the other side, I
will hand you your coat. Thank you for coming.

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.